


the kind of collision that lifts you up

by scioscribe



Category: Justified, True Detective
Genre: Bisexuality, Crossover, Exes, M/M, biromantic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-01
Updated: 2014-07-01
Packaged: 2018-02-07 00:40:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1878489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the morning, they go to Lexington.  Marty lets Rust drive, which is so unprecedented Rust gets antsy about it and keeps drifting into the wrong lanes.  Marty looks out the window every time they go by a pasture and says, “Horses,” every time, like each one is such a surprise he has to announce its presence.</p><p>(Or, the one where Rust used to hook up with Boyd Crowder and might again.  Not that he wouldn't prefer it another way.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	the kind of collision that lifts you up

**Author's Note:**

> You can probably follow this without having seen _Justified_ , but I doubt you could follow it without having seen _True Detective_. And many thanks to whoever I saw on Tumblr who said their headcanon was bisexual!Rust and biromantic!Marty--I'd love to credit by name if anyone either knows who's responsible for putting that idea in my head or _is_ the person who put that idea in my head.
> 
> Besides the pairings in the tags, bonus implied Boyd/Raylan.

**1**

Between the two of them, navigating day-to-day business is navigating a field of landmines. Either Marty minds the cheating spouse cases or Rust minds that he doesn’t mind them and they both get antsy over missing kids. They do a lot of bail-jumpers because neither of them minds spending hours and even days in the car, pissing on the side of the road and drinking gas station coffee even if they have to chase it with Tums these days and buy those snake-like pillows for their necks and then forget to use them. Anyway, all they do is run after people.

Inevitable, then, that they start the chase after someone with a cousin in Kentucky. “Cousin in Kentucky,” Marty says, musingly, “sounds like a country song.”

“Where in Kentucky?”

Marty squints at the computer screen and Rust doesn’t say, _You need glasses_ , because it’s a Sisyphean battle he’s been waging for the last month at least and right now he doesn’t have the energy for it. “Harlan. So it is like a country song. You know that song—”

“I’m not much for music.”

“Yeah. Probably just discordant whale sounds with some Latin in the background. God help any girl you ever made a mix-tape for in high school.”

“Not in the mood to discuss my love life,” Rust says.

**2**

(1994. Eight months before the DEA shootout that left him losing blood in a parking lot, his eyes fixed to an oil spot beneath Ginger’s abandoned truck. Kentucky, Harlan County. Crash approximating the butter-thick-spread of everybody’s accents because Crash was an asshole.

And then Crash split off from Ginger and the rest and sold some coke to some hillbilly, name of Boyd Crowder, with hair like a squirrel tail. Boyd was twenty-three, twenty-four. They got high and compared scars— _this was my upbringing, this was Desert Storm, this was a guy with a pool cue_ —and things escalated from there.

Boyd kissed like he was long on dreaming but fucked like he’d always been short on time. Crash stayed in Harlan a week and a half and at the end of it Boyd made him a tape for the drive back, the kind of gesture that told Rust he was a man of quick and thorough loyalties. He listened to about half of it. Women with voices like syrup and men who used too many adjectives for Ginger’s taste.

“What’s with this faggot shit?” Ginger said. “Where’d you get it?”

“Swiped it,” Crash said, easy, in a half-slur, and lobbed it out of the window before Ginger could see the handwriting on it.)

**3**

Rust says, “We could check things out here a little more first.”

“What’s crawled up your ass about Kentucky, anyway? It’s the guy’s only family. Last week you sat here telling me kinship was a boil that had to be lanced before people could go on with their lives, and don’t tell me you fucking didn’t, because I remember wondering if you had some kind of Word-of-the-Day calendar and I didn’t notice. Because a normal person would have just said ‘family.’” Marty snorts. “Kinship.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Well, _articulate_ your feelings,” Marty says, smart-ass, like a shrink, and Rust’s been to half-a-dozen or so, unwillingly.

“I know a guy there.”

“Know how?”

Rust shrugs. “Sold him some cocaine once.” _Gave him a blowjob_ , he doesn’t say. He has no problem keeping secrets like that from Marty. There are things that can’t be said at first because they’re insignificant and then they can’t be said later because they get grafted into the bone and can’t be said, just amputated, and this is that because one, he cannot lose Marty, and he cannot afford to be wrong about what Marty will say, and two, that confession, that little thing of liking men about as often as women, has gotten more complicated over the years, weightier. He is living in the man’s house. Marty’s breath fogs up the bathroom mirror a minute before his own. And he’s been thinking about that last fact, and others like it, a little more than is good for him.

And Marty, with his fucking green-ear deductions, is sharp enough. He would draw a line from Crash and Boyd Crowder to Rust and Marty.

‘Course, there’s no guarantee Boyd is even still alive. No guarantee but his eyes, a thousand times sharper than Rust ever let Crash’s be, even when he was high.

But Marty has almost, _almost_ taken the bait, because _his_ eyes have gotten narrow, and he says, “This guy have it out for you or something?”

“He knew me as Crash.”

“Yeah,” Marty says, “I deduced that from the coke, unless you’ve got hobbies I don’t know about.”

Rust’s been told he has no sense of humor, but he thinks that’s funny, at least. His mouth quirks up, the movement so hard it hurts. “Just rather not see him again.”

Marty nods, slowly, like he’s not used to Rust having opinions. “Like rather not see him again or like—” and Rust doesn’t know what he’s going to follow it with, but probably nothing serious, but for some reason he interrupts, says:

“Forget I said anything.” Shoves himself away from the desk with too much force; keeps himself in the chair by the soles of his shoes and friction alone. “Fuck it. Let’s go.”

**4**

Marty needles him the whole ride up. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

“Would you tell me if you weren’t?”

 _I did_ , Rust thinks. “Yeah,” he lies. He reaches for cigarettes that aren’t there anymore. Marty said he should quit and he did, like he’s that much of an asshole lately, that he’ll take proofs and make confessions of love as small as that. That’s where he admits it—in the car ride to Harlan, Kentucky. That’s where the word crystallizes in his mind for sure. Edges sharp enough on it to cut himself.

**5**

So they come into Harlan and knock on the cousin’s door. Surprise-surprise, the guy says he knows nothing. The cadence of his voice tastes like deep-fryer oil gone stale, what Rust associates with lying and what would be helpful if people talking to cops—and they still look like cops, Marty especially—didn’t always sound like that. Then it’s twilight and the air’s heavy and there’s nothing left for them to do but get a room.

“We don’t need more’n one, right,” Marty says, while they’re still in the car. He tips the question so it does and doesn’t have a question mark at the end of it. “I mean, at home—”

At home there’s still a hallway between them. Rust can sit with his head back against his headboard and not hear Marty breathing through the wall and that he knows this to a scientific accuracy is just more salt in the wound. He doesn’t know why Marty is so hung up on the rooms unless it’s the price. “Just get two beds,” he says, and something in Marty’s face shifts like sand sliding down the length of a beach, everything still level but the surface somehow different.

They get two beds in one room and Marty unpeels the hotel soaps from their wrappers and dares Rust to make things out of them. Rust starts, the tip of his knife against ivory that smells like nothingness, when someone’s hand raps against their door.

He knows it’s Boyd before he opens it. Fate fucks everyone it can.

With Boyd trapped in the glass of the peephole like a fish in a bowl, Rust says quietly to Marty, “It’s the guy I was telling you about before. Whatever it is—”

Marty waves a hand dismissively. “Different times, different places.” He’s not so dismissive he doesn’t crack open the bedside table, reach his hand in for his gun. The reassurance of it is like a warm hand on the back of Rust’s neck.

He opens the door.

“Rustin Cohle,” Boyd says, musingly. “Now that’s a better name than the one you were wearing last time I saw you. I’m gonna flatter myself and say you remember me.”

“I do.”

Boyd’s eyes flicker over Marty. “Any reason this conversation has to have an audience?”

“Sure,” Marty says. “I paid for the fucking room.”

“Well, money does buy a lot of convenience,” Boyd says. “Of course, there are substitutes—or intertwined forces, you like that better. Power is one.”

“You saying you’re powerful?” Marty comes to his feet and now he does have the gun.

Rust steps back a little so Marty has a sight-line, if necessary. Boyd notices and looks Rust over almost regretfully. After that, his voice is different.

“I find people with power don’t usually have to testify to it,” Boyd says. “The fact that I’m here, though, should answer your question. Mr. Hart. Consider this a notice that you’ve stepped on someone’s welcome mat. I have nothing against a few _private dicks_ , but you know how the law is about trespassers. Let them in and soon enough you have to start letting _everyone_ in.”

“We’re not infringing,” Rust says. “We’re interested in one person. You can spare one body. Not even a local.”

“For old time’s sake?” Boyd says. He still has the smile Rust remembers, the manufactured one, all Army-donated polish and the lie you want to be the truth. “The man you’re looking for—I suppose if I were truly interested in finding him, I’d go to someone in the business of finding people.”

“ _We’re_ in the business of finding people, you shithead,” Marty says.

Boyd’s smile only gets more intense. “Now, for a friend of Rustin’s, I give leeway, but only so much.”

Rust feels Marty’s coming retort like breath on his back and flips his hand back behind him to wave him off; Marty, miraculously, quiets.

“OF course I was talking about the United States Marshal Service,” Boyd says, “a branch of which rests not a few hours from here in Lexington. Not maligning your chosen profession. You tell Raylan Givens I said hello.”

“Givens,” Rust says.

“And now, when it’s so late,” Boyd says, “I think I’m entitled to ask for an escort to my car.”

Marty laughs.

“I’ve got it,” Rust says quickly. “Don’t worry about it.”

He steps out into the parking lot and lets the door close behind him. Boyd is considerate enough to let them get a few paces away from the room before he says anything. In Rust’s experience, men with both violence and unusual loves in their hearts often are considerate in that way, if no other, and Boyd is no exception. He leans against the side of his truck and in the moonlight it’s like he’s putting himself on display, like he knows that being ten years younger has come in like a jackpot for him now and yeah, he’s good-looking, has done less shit to his body than Rust has done to his. His hairline’s up but what’s there is soft, looks touchable even in the dimness of the lot.

“Bunch of people had their lives go up in flames after you left, last time,” Boyd says softly. “I guess now I can put together why I wasn’t one of them.”

“You weren’t on my list,” Rust says. He doesn’t mention sentiment and he doesn’t mention the tape.

Boyd tilts at look at him, cocky but something else, too, and then laughs, a low and surprisingly beautiful sound. “Maybe I wasn’t. _Crash_.”

No one’s called him that since Ginger. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t like it; unsurprisingly, he responds to it, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, going loose-limbed, going velvet-voiced, going sharp-eyed, going—almost—hard. He pushes it down and away from him, like the dog’s not in him but something that’s put its paws against his chest without permission. “Is this going somewhere anytime soon?”

“You know why I should have known to kill you fifteen years ago?” Boyd says. “You even fuck like a lawman.”

“You fuck a lot of lawmen, Boyd?”

“Oh,” Boyd says, “one or two.” He tips his fingers to his eyebrow, some half-assed salute. “You take care now, Rustin Cohle. And find your way to Lexington in the morning.”

“For old time’s sake,” Rust says.

“I never offer mercy on any other condition,” Boyd says, and just like that, the conversation’s over.

**6**

Rust has few illusions, but sometimes he lies anyway, especially to himself, because really after that he steps forward. His blood crashes through his head like thunder and there’s that word again, _crash_ , like it excuses everything, like it makes him into someone else just by being in the air. He presses Boyd back and Boyd opens his mouth. For a second. Rust skims his lips over Boyd’s like he tasting them. The last time they did this, he was running away from Sophia, and this time he’s running away from someone else; he wonders if that’s what Boyd is, a place for all intervening history to disappear.

But Boyd, turns out, doesn’t want to be that person, even if he is: he flattens a hand against Rust’s chest. “Not that that wasn’t good—”

“Oh, fuck you.”

“—but I’m afraid my circumstances have changed since last we met.”

It’s strange, wanting to run but not having a place to run to, like Alaska has just crumbled off the side of the continent. He stands there with nothing to say.

“I’m getting married in a few months,” Boyd says. He says it with a peculiar emphasis, like when all that white lace froth and champagne comes it’ll have been as hard-won as any battle.

Rust, at any rate, knows when he’s lost. “Congratulations.”

**7**

He goes back into the hotel room and Marty’s cleaning his gun and doesn’t even look up, which is how Rust knows. Did he see the blinds at the window part just before he reached or Boyd? No, but he knew they were because he knows Marty, who almost fucked his cover back in ninety-five by going in with a ball-cap and a half-assed story when he lost track of Rust. So Rust knows Marty, has the information he needs to know Marty, and knows himself, too, and his habit of burning things down on his way out of town, coming to the station with the smell of Maggie still on him like he needs some paperwork _just that fucking badly_.

Marty finally graces Rust with his attention and Rust feels like he doesn’t know what, like his skin’s scalded and he’s going to be touched anyway and one way or another it’s going to kill him.

But Marty just says, “There was that time in ninety-seven I kind of wondered about that,” and something inside Rust uncoils, because ninety-seven was still their good time, even if now is their best time. “You and—”

“I remember,” Rust says, not wanting to go into it.

Marty nods and Rust can see him unspooling it all in his head. After that was Laurie, so Marty could have thought it was nothing, but now he has all the pieces, so Rust just has to wait for Marty to say that Rust has never made a single choice in his life so it doesn’t surprise him, this waffling back and forth between men and women, or else for Marty to say that at least Rust is only _half_ -queer. Enough practice can teach anybody to absorb a blow—the secret is to keep going on afterwards like you didn’t get one, because Marty likes to think nothing he says ever leaves a bruise on anyone.

Or he used to like to think that, anyway, and Rust is cautious.

Marty says, “You’re better-lookin’ than him.”

Rust had his hands in fists but now they open up, involuntarily.

“I wasn’t thinking that,” he says.

“Well,” Marty says.

There’s a moment of silence. Marty rolls his fingers against the bedspread and pills up the cloth.

**8**

In the morning, they go to Lexington. Marty lets Rust drive, which is so unprecedented Rust gets antsy about it and keeps drifting into the wrong lanes. Marty looks out the window every time they go by a pasture and says, “Horses,” every time, like each one is such a surprise he has to announce its presence.

It’s strange, being in the aftermath of something and not having there be ashes on the ground or the smell of gunpowder in the air. Rust keeps waiting for an explosion to even things out.

Every time Marty says, “Horses,” Rust flinches, like Marty’s voice is the sound of a safety clicking off.

**9**

“I remember you two,” the Chief Deputy Marshal says. He’s eating Chinese food with chopsticks and he points the chopsticks at both of them at the same time, horned wood splitting off, held together at the hand, like Rust and Marty are, to everyone else, two fractured parts of the same thing. No one who knows them ever believes that. “All that shit a year ago, yeah. Good for you. What brings you to my neck of the woods?”

Marty acts like he always does now around strangers: half-eager connection with anyone who looks like they think he’s hot shit and half-protectiveness of Rust, his body turned slightly like there’s going to be a shootout and he’ll have to block the bullet. Rust knows his own PTSD, for what it’s worth, but he doesn’t know Marty’s, not intimately, except every now and then he thinks he catches a glimpse of it.

“We got our guy, who ran up here, probably, and we got a guy of yours here who says we should come to you.” Marty shrugs. “Consider it a citizen recommendation: marshals find people better than anybody. Shit, I hope that’s not true, or we’re out of a job.”

Everyone laughs, and by everyone Rust means everyone but him, because this bonhomie-between-men is something he’s never given a shit about, or even understood.

(“Okay, I know you ain’t been around people in a while,” Marty said after one disastrous interview, “but you gotta stop staring at them for like half an hour and not saying anything.”)

So when the Chief Deputy looks at him, Rust shows his teeth, obediently, which doesn’t seem to reassure anybody.

They talk names and D.O.B.s and K.A.s until Rust says, “Which one’s Raylan Givens?”

“Aw, shit,” the Chief Deputy says. Like this is something that happens to him a lot. Marty gives him a look like he empathizes. “Out there. Tall son-of-a-bitch with that hat on his desk.”

Rust finds him. Givens is tall, and he makes Marty’s comments about who’s good-looking, Boyd or Rust, irrelevant, because lust has always been something he accesses, like a cordoned-off area of a bombed-out city, something destructive, unpleasant, ever since Claire, and Givens isn’t even his type, but _damn_. He isn’t a well Rust could drown in. He’s something else. A long fuse burning out—Rust knows the look. In his head, Boyd Crowder laughs and talks about lawmen.

Rust gives him a nod and Raylan Givens nods back, and his smile’s friendly but he’s already reaching down to his hip because that’s how Rust looks, to him.

Rust goes back into the office.

Marty’s shaking the Chief’s hand. “Well, thanks for your time, sorry my partner fucked off in the middle of it.” He puts his hand on Rust’s shoulder and shakes him lightly, the first physical contact they’ve had since last night, and Rust’s whole body turns into the touch, like he’s a weathervane and Marty is the wind.

“We’ve all got one,” the Chief says, like Rust is an accessory that Marty’s picked out and the return policy’s lapsed.

Marty doesn’t say anything, but he moves again, puts his body between Rust and whoever else is there. Rust knows what words mean, but he knows what this means, too, and he knows what he values more. He doesn’t say that Marty is better-looking than Boyd Crowder and he doesn’t say that Marty is better-looking than Raylan Givens, because one isn’t true and the other _sure as shit_ isn’t true, but they’re both irrelevant. Marty is the only one he trusts near him. The only body that is as much promise as threat.

**10**

This time, on the Chief Deputy’s word, they don’t go to the cousin’s house, they go to the cousin’s girlfriend’s house.

Marty hauls their guy out by the collar of his jacket. He smells like weed. “Darryl Rhodes,” he says.

Rust is glad Marty said the name because he’d forgotten it. His head is clouded with too many others lately.

They deposit Darryl Rhodes with the marshals for transport back to the state for trial.

In the cool air outside the courthouse, Marty laces his fingers behind his head and says, “You feel that, Rust? Simple, uncomplicated victory.”

**11**

“One room,” Marty says at the hotel counter. He says it like someone has asked him to offer a definition of something, on the Oxford English Dictionary’s authority or none at all, and this is what he has to offer.

All that clarity disappears once they’re actually alone again, with patterned duvets and the sound of laughter at the other end of the hall. Rust contemplates how much money it would take for him to get drunk out of the mini-bar. But Marty turns on the TV, just on the hotel information channel that tells them the pool hours and where to find their adult entertainment, and, the left side of his face lit up blue from the screen, says, “When we were talking, last year—the interviews—I got to thinking about how much you have to leave out of a story for it to make sense.”

Rust unscrews the first cap of the liquor bottle. “Story of what?” He doesn’t drink, not yet.

“The story of you.”

“The story of me.”

“Generic you. Like: _This is Your Life_. The story you tell yourself about who you are.”

“Look,” Rust says, “obviously you’re thinking of something specific, and I ain’t in the mood for guessing games.”

“I kissed somebody before,” Marty says. He takes the little bottle out of Rust’s hand and nabs a swallow of it. Rust watches his throat move because it’s dangerous to watch his lips. “Somebody like—not somebody like you, because for damn sure there’s nobody like you, but a guy. It didn’t go anywhere. It wouldn’t have anyway, I was eighteen and the only shit I knew about being a man was what you didn’t do with another man, but all the same. He was someone I’d known a while.”

He says that like it’s the end of the story.

Rust says, “Marty?” all soft, like Marty is a wineglass and the wrong sound will make him break.

“I said it wouldn’t have worked because of me,” Marty says, “but it also wouldn’t have worked because the sex wasn’t too good. And when you’re eighteen, about any sex is good. It would work out okay once it happened, but I never wanted it, not like I did other times, and so the story, the _story_ , Rust, is that it’s all well and good and who gives a fuck if it’s in private, but you know not to talk about it, you don’t say it, but you get to tell yourself, if you’re thinking about it, that it never counted. Because women—it’s different with women. So you don’t say, ‘I could have kissed him for the rest of my life,’ because kissing’s, shit. What’s kissing? All you have to know about is fucking. Who you want to fuck. So.”

“So.”

“But I probably only could have kissed him for a couple of months before the shine went off the apple,” Marty concludes.

“Not the rest of your life.”

“When I said that,” Marty says, “I was thinking about something else.”

Rust nods. He’s standing and Marty’s sitting on the bed. Everything Rust is sure of is Marty.

He says, “I think about the rest of my life, too,” and he lets Marty stand up, so close to him that their clothes skim.

Then Marty kisses him. His mouth is solid and warm and the tastes of him are specific, the tastes of him are the tastes of Rust’s own mouth. It isn’t like kissing Boyd. Marty offers him no vanishing point. Whatever this is, it will not be hot enough to burn him down. He reaches for Marty’s belt buckle and Marty falters but then allows it, but that’s what it feels like, _an allowance_ , and when Rust undoes and unzips him, he’s only half-hard. Rust wants to suck him off about as much as he’s ever wanted anything but he presses the heel of his hand into his own thigh and backs himself down, remakes his conception—only ever partly formed anyway—of how this is all going to go.

Marty just looks embarrassed by it all, now that they aren’t kissing anymore, like all he’s learned about manhood is that it doesn’t matter who you fuck as long as you _do_ fuck them, and so he squares his jaw like he’s headed into a boxing ring, like Rust is going to ask him for something he will have no way to say no to. But they have time to figure all that out.

Rust smiles and hates that he knows he’s doing it, hates that he’s aware of how happy he is, how much he wants to kiss that smile off his mouth and onto Marty’s. There’s a danger to it.

But Marty catches the smile and echoes it back, the self-consciousness draining out of the moment. He puts his hands on his hips and thrusts himself out. It never was in Marty to refuse Rust’s admiration, Rust understands that now. And is content.

**12**

“Fuck it,” Marty says at two in the morning. He’s curved against Rust’s back, his arm thrown over Rust’s hips, and every now and then he breathes hard against Rust’s neck because Rust’s hair has gotten in his face: that’s a litany of parts Rust likes and holds close to his mind. “Neither one of us was getting laid much anyhow.”

“Mm.”

“I mean, it’s going to be a shit-show of a time explaining it when we have to explain it.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey,” Marty says, kissing him on the back of the neck and flicking him on the hipbone at the same time. “You want to participate in this conversation about our future, asshole?”

Rust shook his head. “Had a lot happen in the last few days, what with the psycho ex and the road trip and the getting you and all. Kind of just want to sleep, if that’s okay.”

“You need me to get off you?”

“No,” Rust says. He’s never been able to sleep with another person’s body heat flat against him that way, but then again, it was years since he last tried. “You’re good.” It’s more restful than most of the sleep he gets. He counts the clock numbers ticking up instead of sheep. Marty nuzzles in his sleep: a fact he stores away as important, somehow.

**13**

Once they’re back home, Rust sends Boyd Crowder a Crock-Pot as a wedding gift. He figures he owes him that much, if nothing else. Marty pouts about it until Rust explains what exactly it is he’s grateful for. Then he preens.


End file.
